ComfortZone

As part of our church’s 6-week fast, Gregg asked me to make a banner as a focal point and to help illus­trate a theme. Found near the end of the book of Joshua (Joshua 24:14-28), the story tells about the com­mit­ment that the people made to follow God, and the marker stone Joshua placed at the base of a large oak tree, to remind the people of their com­mit­ment. We at NFC are cor­po­rately and per­son­ally renew­ing our com­mit­ment to follow and serve the Lord, so these are excit­ing times!

After think­ing about this oppor­tu­nity, I decided to do some­thing unusual. Some­thing big. (At 17.5 x 3 feet, this is the biggest banner I’ve ever made!)

It was a fun project! The best part being that I got to spend half of Sat­ur­day (includ­ing a Subway lunch) with my daugh­ter Alison… Together we enlarged it, painted it, waited for it to dry, and hung it. I’m SO glad she helped me. With­out her it would have taken twice as long! Plus she’s a great painter and good at mixing colors!

The drawing:

First, I made the simple sketch with the pen tool in Adobe Illus­tra­tor at 1/12th size (1 inch = 1 foot). Then I applied a “char­coal” stroke to the lines, col­ored them, and filled the areas with simple colors.

Trade secret #1 (how we enlarged it):

We used the church’s pro­jec­tor to enlarge the file directly onto butcher paper that was taped to the wall. We traced the out­lines in pencil. Then we painted in the colors, sort of like “paint by num­bers” with tem­pera paint. So cool!

Notice the re-​purposing of the pro­jec­tor on the left side of the next photo. We used its cool­ing fan for a while to help dry the paint! It was pretty slow so we even­tu­ally took it out­side into the sun­shine. A gust of wind over­turned part of it, and it did smear in a couple of places (if you look REAL close you may see them), but thank­fully no major damage was done!

I brought my Dad’s long ladder with the extended arms to get to the top of the arch, and I taped clean rags on to its arms to keep from scuff­ing the walls.

This domed struc­tural fea­ture is some­what like an apse in cathe­dral archi­tec­ture. What­ever it is called, there was an amaz­ing view from up there!

Trade secret #2 (how it is held up):

Fin­ished!